Redesigning Civic Education for a Rhetorical Age: Participatory Politics in the Context of Mass Composition

• In Event: 58.081 - Exploring Authorship in the Age of Mass Literacy: The Rise of Writing in People's Everyday Lives

Abstract

Technological developments and their accompanying shifts in norms and practices for circulation of content have been linked to transformations in practices of political and civic engagement (Jenkins et al, 2016). In this presentation I explore Brandt’s (2015) question “What happens when writing overtakes reading as the basis of people’s literate experience?” in relationship to key findings from a set of linked research studies that argues for this link conducted by a cross-disciplinary team of researchers in the Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) network (http://ypp.dmlcentral.net). The presentation will present this model and draw implications for new approaches to civic and political education that respond to these transformations in the ecology of political participation.
Drawing on three waves of a national panel survey of youth (Cohen et al, 2015; Cohen et al. 2012) as well as case studies of activist youth across a range of issue areas (Jenkins et al, 2015; James, 2014), YPP argues for resituating civic action within a framework of participatory politics (Kahne, et al, 2015). This framework repositions civic education within a rhetorical model that focuses on practices of production and circulation, dialog and feedback, investigation and research, and mobilization (Kahne, et al., 2016) as central to the practice of political and civic life. It also represents a challenge to current models of civic education that limit civics to understanding and participating in institutional politics.
The presentation will briefly review these findings and framework, then turn to emerging insights from practitioner inquiry and action research projects launching in response to the framework in Oakland, Chicago (http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/projects/educating-participatory-politics), and in large-scale online platforms such as Letters to the Next President (http://Letters2president.org).

Author

• Elyse A. Eidman-Aadahl, University of California - Berkeley